When I was growing up and someone talked about not being “worldly,” I would think of not smoking, drinking, dancing, or going to movies. In the Bible worldliness is even more challenging.

The New Testament often uses “the world” to talk about evil. Why does it use this term? The usage with which I was familiar as a youth pointed to visible habits of behavior from which we were to be separated. We were the church; the sinful life outside the church was “the world.”

The biblical term goes further. The world refers to the order of society. It is one of the ways in which the Bible warns us that evil has a character that is social and political. It involves more than isolated actions of individuals. Evil is social as well as personal.

Our word “world” points us too quickly to a physical place. World is a translation of the Greek term cosmos, meaning order, that which is assembled well. We have an echo of that in our word cosmetics, “that which orders our appearance.” So when the writer of 1 Peter 3:3 admonishes women not to let their external adornment [or order] be with gold ornaments, the term used is cosmos.

The term is also applied to the most important ordering of the earthly life: our social order. Cosmos was used to refer to the civic order, the life of state, which provided a congenial order rather than social chaos. The whole universe was viewed as city-state and called order, or our “world.” Values such as friendship, self-control, and justice were important bonds of that order.

For the Greeks, cosmos stood guard against evil. The New Testament and first-century Judaism, however, had a powerful and forbidding realization of the significance of humanity’s fall away from God. For them cosmos was an intruder bearing immorality into their lives. Paul says that to avoid immoral persons of the fallen order (cosmos), one would have to leave human society (cosmos) altogether (1 Cor. 5:10). Ephesians 2:1-2 [NRSV] describes how Christ has made believers alive when “dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world (cosmos).”

The significance of this biblical understanding of “the world” is that it expands our sense of mission by expanding the geography of evil that we are to oppose on behalf of Christ.  Evil exists in the ordering of society around the person and exerts a powerful and destructive influence on him or her. Our mission must be social.

The breadth of the fabric of society is included in the New Testament use of cosmos. It involves the system of property and wealth. I John 3:17 speaks of “whoever has the world’s means of livelihood.” When Paul instructs us that we are to “make use of the world” but to not “overuse” it, he is referring to economic relations so necessary for life that we cannot separate ourselves from them.

The New Testament includes in “the world” —  the class and status classifications of social life — ways in which we identify and separate individuals and groups. Reference is made to the poor, foolish, weak, and lowly of the world (James 5:1-5; 1 Cor. 1:27-28). The political rule of societies also belongs to this ordering of life (Matt. 4:8). The government controlled by “the world,” the evil social order, now is subject to Christ (Rev. 11:15).

We can say that for the New Testament in many passages “the world” is organized in hostility to God. Thus, we must critique our political, economic, and social patterns and all the values and assumptions associated with them. Where they are in resistance to God’s ways, we must work toward change.

Worldliness occurs when sin is so familiar that we accept it without reflection. We were socialized into it, and it is reinforced constantly by the life around us. It is the seduction of the ordinary.